Softpedia Security News

Softpedia News - Security

Softpedia News - Security

New Worm Locks Documents with Password Malware researchers from Panda Security warn of a new worm, which locks all documents, presentations or emails found on infected computers with a password.Dubbed Clippo.A, the worm copies itself as PICTURE.EXE and SOUND.EXE to all folders on the system, as well as to removable drives or network shares where it has write permissions.... Kirstie Allsopp's Twitter Account Hijacked and Used for Spam Sunday evening UK TV celebrity Kirstie Allsopp had her Twitter account hijacked by spammers, who directed her almost 48 thousand followers to a scam page.Kirstie Allsopp is a TV presenter for Channel 4, where she hosts several property-related programs like Location, Location, Location, Kirstie's Homemade Home or Relocatio... USB Stick Containing Sensitive Police Data Found on Sidewalk A passerby found an USB stick containing unencrypted counter-terrorism information, as well as details on police officers on the pavement outside a Manchester police station.According to the The Daily Star on Sunday, which originally reported the incident, the memory stick is branded with the Greater Manchester Police (GMP... Facebook Scam Claims to Reveal Things Parents Don't Tell Their Kids One of the latest Facebook scams lures users into taking surveys with the promise of revealing ten things that adults never tell their kids.Spam messages sent from the profiles of people who fell victims to this trick read "10 Things Adults NEVER Tell Their Kids !!" and contain a link to a rogue Facebook page.... Nigerian Scammer Jailed for Over Twelve Years A Nigerian national was sentenced to 151 months in prison last week for instrumenting various advance-fee scams that lead to losses of over $1.3 million.Okpako Mike Diamreyan, 31, of Nigeria was found guilty by a jury in Connecticut back in February of three counts of wire fraud stemming from his activity as an Internet scammer. Phishers Exploit UK Tax Blunder Cybercriminals have launched phishing campaigns to try and profit from the news that up to six million people have overpaid or underpaid their taxes for the past two years in UK.It was recently uncovered that taxation blunders have lead to 1.4 million UK taxpayers paying less money in taxes and 4.3 million paying in excess.In consequence, ... USB Devices Harbor 25% of All New Worms A report coming out of Panda Labs shows an increased trend for new malware and worm attacks to use USB devices as distribution channels.The report places the figure around 25%, so for every one in four USB device, an attack has been reported.Even if email attacks are still predominant, USB threats are on the rise, mainly due to the ... Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5.8.612 Plugs 18 Critical Holes Adobe has issued a security update to its Shockwave Player which patches quite a few critical vulnerabilities. Many of the vulnerabilities could have allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on the target machine. Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5.8.612 closes 18 critical vulnerabilities. All previous versions of Shockwave are a... Turkey and Russia Are the Riskiest Places to Go Online Security company AVG has released the results of an interesting study showing the risk of stumbling unto a malicious website around the world. The results show that the risk varies wildly from country to country. The riskiest place to surf the web is Turkey where one in ten AVG users was faced with a potentially malicious websit... Avast Gets $100 Million Infusion from Summit Partners Security companies seem to be very 'hot' for investors at the moment. Avast Software has just announced that it has received a significant investment, in the amount of $100 million, from venture capital firm Summit Partners. The investor will receive a minority stake in the Czech security software company. Scott Collins, a Managin... Government Payment Hijackers Jailed Three Kenyan nationals, who defrauded four US states of almost $3.4 million by hijacking payments meant for legit vendors, were sentenced to prison on Thursday.According to a Department of Justice press release, Robert M. Otiso, 36, of Elk River, Minn., was sentenced to 72 months in prison for conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud; Paramena J. ... Malware Used to Steal South Korean Military Secrets A lawmaker has uncovered that 1,715 files containing South Korean military secrets, including war plans against North Korea, were stolen from infected Army-issued computers.Song Young-sun, a member of the South Korean parliament, who sits on the National Defense Committee, asked the Defense Ministry recently to release details abou... UK Police Dismantles International Telecom Fraud Ring Police raided several locations in London and arrested nine people suspected of being members of a criminal ring, which stole millions of pounds from telecommunications companies.It looks like the ring was part of an international fraud network built around fraudulently acquired iPhones, inside which multiple gangs handled differ... New Xerox WorkCentre Pro Infected Emails in Circulation A new wave of spam emails purporting to be automated messages sent by Xerox WorkCentre Pro machines are distributing a trojan from the Oficla family of malware.The WorkCentre Pro is a rather popular series of multifunctional devices incorporating copying, printing, scanning and faxing functions manufactured by Xerox. Free iPhone 4 Scam Spreading via Facebook Chat Scammers have begun abusing Facebook's Chat feature to trick users into participating in rogue surveys by promising them free iPhone 4 smartphones in return.Scams in which users are lured onto rogue pages and asked to complete surveys in exchange for access to some intriguing video or picture have become a common occurrence on Facebook ... Spamhaus: We Blocked Google Docs Not Gmail The Spamhaus Project has issued an official statement to clarify that the addition of a Google-owned IP address range to its Spam Block List (SBL) targeted Google Docs and did not affect Gmail.Spamhaus is one of the leading spam fighting organizations in the world and maintains several block lists, which are used by email providers, educatio... Trojan Might Have Contributed to 2008 Madrid Plane Crash New information unearthed in the investigation of the 2008 Spanair Flight JK 5022 crash, suggests that the tragedy could have been prevented if a critical computer wouldn't have been infected with a trojan.El Pais reports (in Spanish) that a computer system tasked with monitoring technical problems and issuing alerts, which ca... Critical Vulnerability Fixed in VLC Media Player The VideoLAN project has released version 1.1.3 of its popular VLC Media Player program, which includes a patch for a critical arbitrary code execution vulnerability.VLC is a powerful cross-platform multimedia player capable of playing most media formats natively, without the need of additional codecs. It is open source and distribute... Flurry of New 'OMG' Scams Plaguing Facebook Security researchers from Sophos warn that a multitude of new scams exploiting people's curiosity have gone viral on Facebook and are leading users to surveys.Some of these scams adopt themes we've seen before, but with slight variations and a bit more elaborated. One such example is that of a teacher beating his student."This is... Rogue Resume Emails Redirect to Scareware A new wave of spam emails masquerading as resume submissions instruct recipients to open attached HTML files, which redirects them to scareware pushing websites.The fake emails come with a subject of "Resume" and their body contains short messages like "Attached, please find" or "please find attached my cv."The name of the rogue ... Facebook Phishing on the Rise Security researchers from German antivirus vendor Avira warn that the number of phishing attacks targeting Facebook users has increased by almost 64% in July, pushing the website in second place on the list of most phished brands.According to statistics compiled by Avira, even though phishing activity targeting PayPal has registered as significant drop ... Critical and High Vulnerabilities Patched in Chrome Google has released new security updates through the Chrome stable channel in order to address several critical and high risk vulnerabilities, two of which were rewarded with special $1,337 prizes.The new 5.0.375.127 update is still silently being pushed to users, so details about some of the fixed bugs were temporarily withheld fr... Facebook Still Exposes Sensitive Information via Login Page The Facebook login page generates an overly explicit error when an incorrect email is inputted, possibly allowing attackers to match stolen information to accounts. The Register reports that Facebook's login page is still leaking sensitive information, even though the website has just reversed a login feature that exposed pr... Several MSN Websites XSSed A Romanian security researcher has discovered multiple cross-site scripting (XSS) weaknesses in several localized MSN websites, which allow for session cookie hijacking and IFrame injection.The bugs were discovered on various websites hosted in sub-sections on ca.msn.com, fr.msn.com, be.msn.com and fi.msn.com.Cross-site scripting weaknesses are... Out-of-Band Critical Security Updates for Reader and Acrobat Released Adobe has released updates to its Reader and Acrobat products in order to address two critical vulnerabilities that can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code.One of the patched bugs is an integer overflow flaw identified as CVE-2010-2862, that was publicly disclosed last month by security researcher Charlie Mi...